Collection

You don't need to know what Tisah B'Av is, if you just know that America is suffering. Find an event this weekend; I have found mine. And I plan to wear mourning, go, be quiet ... and, most likely, weep. Where is your event - or would you like to plan one?


... and, should you need an antidote to American atrocity ...
 

High comedy? Or low - as in that personal space we so often call "down there"? Medieval satire, or: when a lady breaks up with her down-there amid arguments with her. Some satire is evergreen. Or ever-rosy! Never accuse The History Blog of being dry and boring ...

This week in Trek tech - that sun ship I first heard of on DS9, and found bewildering, turns out (like so much Trek tech!) to be a thing. Sailing on a sunbeam. COOL.


But, seriously. Recognize where we are. If that means joining communities of faith this weekend. If that means choosing to give to those who are suffering. If that means prayer, or just reflection. Understand the world, and that it is filled with humanity. And, if you can, if there is an event near you: go. And do.

Collection

The epic *advice* of Gilgamesh.

My day is made, I have encountered the word excrementitious, which actually strikes me as one of those "probably a mellifluously beautiful word, if you don't know what it means" coinages ... Also: scatalogical archaeology! Always fun. Thanks, The History Blog.

Brace yourselves: this is me, not even trying to be clever. Just click. The world's most beautiful libraries. You're welcome. (The click beyond.)

Ahhh, the tedium of FASHION as opposed to style. We all know it's not just clothes, or at least in the form of textiles.

Remember when book covers were done by artists? Remember when all too many of them became photos of headless women? (Remember when we laughed at salads?) Apparently the current trend in cover design is flowers. This seems to surprise some people, but the development seems obvious to me, especially timed after November 2016, when stock photo libraries, advertising, entertainment, and so many visual aspects of the cultural landscape finally began to show women in active contexts, not strictly as pretty presentation objects. We were all sick of the ubiquity of book covers featuring decapitated women and sexualized women (the latter not being mutually exclusive of the former, which: ew). What's the next best sexual image? Flowers. Duh.

How we KNOW

Through the past several months of #MeToo and all of the stories we all have endured, one of the less-spoken throughlines comes down to something like "how do we know not all men are like this?"

Granted, we certainly have the #NotAllMen hashtag to 'splain about these things. Ahem. And lots of us will note the guys in our lives we're sure are above it. Men themselves discuss how abhorrent certain behaviors are.

It is not a fact that the only good men are the men who live in the imaginations of others, idealized out of reality. I don't know there are Good Men just because I think my dad and my brother are good men. I know there are good men because there are men who have unequivocally demonstrated goodness in (cis and otherwise) manhood. And, yeah, it's not all binary either. But let's look at the binary that binds so many, ant look at it.


There are real STORIES, real moments in time, which prove the lie that All Men (whatever that can possibly be thought to mean) are creeps.

And, you know? I think these stories really need to be told. The unambiguously clear stories about non-predatory behavior.


***


Names, obviously, are altered to protect folks I have not seen in years, but let's start off with a couple Tales from College - and I went to a college where tales of the #MeToo sort abounded, to be certain. Hell, the earful my parents got the night before my graduation is enough to speak to the sexual entitlement of drunken frat boys.

But.

Then there was my "brother".

He and I became friends early out of the gate, freshman year (1986/87). It is not unlikely he had a bit of a crush on me, at least at some point, but he never acted upon it. Literally never - and we spent a lot of time together, at all hours and at that age when Not Acting On Things was more an anomaly than an expectation.

Then there was M.

I worked in the scene shop, and he was an associate in the drama department, I think 25 years old or so and himself scarcely past the college years (and so forth). He was wonderfully moody and intellectual, scathingly funny, and pretty well fixed up with all the things I still dig in a guy: dark, curly hair, sardonic wit, and a level of subcultural nerdliness/marginality.

I spent a lot of hours alone in the shop with M, and (as faulty memory implies) probably not without hopes that something drastically inappropriate might occur with him. Memory of any specific ideas I had about him are not clear, but I do have recollection of one particular day, when Beloved Ex and I were on the outs (I met BEx sophomore year, but worked in the scene shop for several; so by this point, I would have known M for a good year and a half - taking a class with him, working with him, making sure of course to display my intellectual cred at every opportunity). We talked a long time, and he let me go on a bit about whatever bothered me - maybe "boys" as a general caste, maybe just BEx specifically. I am fairly certain I made my vulnerability and availability for "reassurance" pretty plain.

And M didn't do a damn thing about it.



Now. Let it not be said I think I was some irresistible thing, so to resist me must be a feather in any man's cap. But I was fairly cute, making myself clear, and oh about twenty to, by then, his maybe 26 or 27. It wasn't exactly out of the question.

But M not only cared about the preservation of his job: essentially, he just was not that guy. He wasn't the guy who would mess with a student, even one he knew well, even one who wasn't "out of the question" - in circumstances other than the situation we actually did share.

Plus, I believe he had a girlfriend.

So, not only is it a dead-cert FACT that some men don't infringe upon women who might even be up for some level of infringement, but some men don't mess around on their girlfriends to do it. This is unquestionable.

There are men who do not use power - authoritarian, financial, or physical - to extort or demean a woman. There are men for whom that could never be sex (etc.) at all.

Collection

Rest in peace, Wallace.

This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers.

Revisiting the shareholder-first business model - courtesy of The New Yorker.

On the unexpectedly morbid history of ribbons as adornment. Naturally, this piece brings to mind the Beresford Ghost, and other stories.

To my knowledge, this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death.

I have to say, this makes more sense to me than fear, perhaps *especially* in the direst of circumstances - precisely because those people are facing deliverance from suffering.

The real point of this article - or, really, the research it discusses - is the guiding force in American healthcare: avoidance of death. I have known more than one person who would have been happier had they not been treated not-to-death, honestly. I do not intend to become the dying person constantly snatched back from the brink, either, and I don't wish to die in a hospital. This morning, I said to someone who said, "Getting old sucks!" "Yeah, but it beats the alternative." The fact is, sometimes death beats some of the medical alternatives, too. The trick is to know when to choose what. At some point, perhaps I will have the grace and blessing to choose not to incur obscene debt for life"saving" measures which prolong my agony and deplete my earthly resources. If I get there, I don't expect I'll face the end with horror or regret.

To people furious over the Kathy Griffin photo I ask, where were you when effigies of Obama were lynched and burned across the eight years of his administration...?

The Boston Globe has an EXCELLENT piece looking at the outrage surrounding the Trumpian Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar. And I say: um, yeah. Anyone who thinks this play is a celebration of assassination is ... well, let us use the term "uninformed" to be kind.

Throwback post - because it needs to be said. Again and again and again.

And again. Because we KNOW it's about power, not sex.

Collection

I'm not sure I've linked to Reider Amy Shaefer's blog before, but she is a wonderful and witty storyteller. Please enjoy The Incident of the Broken Stick - and a couple other stories! (Other Reiders: when she says she's going back to the reef, does that mean *our* little home on Teh Intarwebs?)

My chocolate-covered espresso beans were getting a bit existential on me this morning, with only a punctuation mark ...

It might have been too much for me, pre-caffeinated: but still it was funny!

All thought of current events aside (and I feel the headline is extremely shoddy/misleading), Vanity Fair has a great historical look at Russia. If you care to think of it as contextualizing the present, that's fine, but in itself this article provides literary and history lessons well worth reading.

Okay, and in closing - this next link is NOT safe for work, and for some readers it might be distasteful in any setting.

The sexual advice column Savage Love has a very interesting look at the psychology of the golden shower, sex more generally, and whether the most famous golden shower in history, currently in the headlines, was about sex at all. (It seems explicitly not to have been; assuming it occurred at all; sources and facts are all still under intense review.) The piece provides an intelligent view on what so far has been referred to as "perversion" - but the reason for it may be much more disturbing than that. It's also an intelligent view of the mental and biological facts of (a) how icky sex is, and (b) how human beings get past that. ON at least two levels, this is truly an intriguing read.

Collection

Pour La Victoire has a lovely post this week on the poupee de mode. Today's fashion puppets tend to be taller, and to have reality shows, but the idea remains the same - get the images out to the public, on trends and fashions ... in the cheapest way possible. Ahem.

Many people have heard of the hypocaust, the ancient system of whole-building heating perfected and made most famous in the West by the Romans. I expect fewer of us have run across ancient air-conditioning: so enjoy a quick virtual trip to Kuwait, where a centuries-old evaporative cooling system has been unearthed at the island of Failaka.

Elsewhere on The History Blog, our author says "An old, damaged tin can may not seem like much of an archaeological discovery" - clearly, this guy hasn't met my pal Mojourner, an archaeologist himself and a tin-can enthusiast since way back. Still, the link above makes for an interesting look at high-end tins of the 19th century, a curious bit about onanism, and a whole lot of info about turtle soup. Ya know, in case you were curious whether there'd ever been such a thing!

Okay, and I really have to pause, because - nineteenth century dietetic magical obsessions with "aching sensibility" (a term I find hilarical) are sort of fascinating in a way. Don't even ask what Dr. Graham would have served out of a tin. (Hint: not turtle soup, he was vegetarian.)

But how many are there in Blackburn Lancashire ... ?

... It's been a long while since I linked to Isis' Wardrobe, but a recent post has a GLORIOUS array of images ... of holes! Centuries of simple to sumptuous design and function: the holes in our clothes.


The name Leaphart is plangently evocative.

Squicky

It's no surprise that, in the general sense, "Westerners" (I'll refrain from defining THAT, if I may) find the concept of a wet nurse ooky, if not outright immoral. I have been a little surprised, though, at some of the specific folks who've recoiled a bit when I've brought up research for the WIP.

Personally, the idea of milk-kinship in particular intrigues me, particularly in the context of American slavery and the biological use of women. Reading historicals, as I almost always have, wet nursing wasn't clear to me early on, but once I understood it, it's possible I've known about the practice for more of my life than most, and so have never much questioned it.

One of the most important characters (in a multi-generational novel, and as the story grows, I am more and more hesitant to describe anyone as a "main" character) in my WIP starts out as a midwife and becomes a wet nurse. I am fairly confident in the whys and wherefores of this latter situation; setting up not only her physical ability to lactate, as well as its cultivation, but also the job itself and her position in the household. Less confident is my providing her the transition from midwife to wet nurse, and research on this sort of job shift in Late Antiquity Ostrogothic Italy is not easy to find (suggestions welcome!), but I hope it can be believed, because her being both is important as the novel is developing so far.

Almost impossible to find is any resource discussing what a worship service in the Arian Christian church looked like - but that is another post for another day. (Suggestions welcome!)

Perhaps the most modern literary reference to wet nursing is Rosasharn, in The Grapes of Wrath, whose gift of her milk is not presented as creepy or gross in any way. Less modern, but much more recently written, is Mirabilis by Susann Cokal, in which the main character nurses an entire population, in a historical set in France. I can't think of any movie depicting wet nursing, except perhaps in the most passing way, and Juliet's Nurse is less identifiable to most high-schoolers flogging their way through Shakespeare by her biological function than by her indecipherability, where she is supposed to be the comic relief and few really get that, any more than the rest of the language.

Wet nursing isn't much addressed in memoir, science fiction, fantasy, nor by category of audience. We have issues with the breast as a source of nutrition. The idea of sharing bodily fluids wigs people out for one reason or another - fear of disease, fear of being replaced as a mother or as a spouse, fear of intimacies unfamiliar to the nuclear family model, religious morality, name the parameters. I can still recall a scene from The Last Emperor, in which an eight-year-old Pu Yi nurses from his extraordinarily beautiful (and exotic; coz, yeah exoticization) wet nurse, and the way people responded with shock and titillation. I can recall The Big News story of its minute when an American woman nurses her child after it's old enough to be walking, talking, and training in the essential sexuality of the breast, which even still we are not comfortable seeing as the source of nutrition and bonding.

Sigh.

If my blog were more widely read, here we would have the onset of commentary on the fact that I have never procreated nor lactated myself. Let's consider my ignorance as read and remember I don't know what it's like to be an ancient Frankish warrior either, nor have I ever experienced life in Ravenna nor Paris, never mind 1500 years ago. I am an author, and "write what you know" is, frankly, horsefeathers.



Beyond milk-kinship and the fascination of a world not my own, the transactional nature of wet nursing is a deep draw for me in this writing (as the similar nature of sex has been). This character has traded on her body in a different way than many modern people might think of a woman "using her body" to get ahead or to support herself. The moral and the practical considerations, for this time, are vastly unfamiliar to our mindset, if not entirely inconceivable. Putting aside the objections my society, indeed even my friends and my family, might have to the idea of wet nursing, and exploring it not just as an institution but also at the individual level, where my characters meet, is exciting to me, an opportunity once again to leave my skin and leave the air I breathe and sounds I live with, and to imagine living another way, in another place.

This, for me, is what writing is *for* - because "the story", whatever else it is, is always a projection out of the familiar, out of the present. To me, "the story" is sacred space, takes place in sacred time. It's outside my workday and yours, outside what we know, outside, perhaps, even what we ACCEPT. Whether it is acceptable in its own terms, acceptable at all - these are the tricky fascinations of telling a story, the rabbit holes we bolt down, following its plot. Do I accept a world of dragons and palaces, where everybody's white and royal? Do I accept dystopian tales, where young people are imperiled? Do I accept these images of faith, of life, of relationships and of distances between my characters?

I'm a writer; I get to decide what to describe and where to go. You get to decide whether you'll come along, down the rabbit hole ...

A Twit Who Writes

Over the past six months or so, I've seen the (wildly unreliable and self-contradictory, I know) stats on this blog bloat stupendously in the 'bot department, and I lulled for a long time in promoting it (mostly on Twitter). So it became a regular pattern to see 500 hits a day from Russia and like 38 from the United States. France became highly occupied with me during this period--enough that I could not consider it genuine traffic, and asked myself the occasional "So, France--new spam capitol of the world? Huh" and got so I hated seeing my daily traffic.

I also was looking at the hard times in my family, dealing with big events at work, traveling on my own, and even occasionally trying to WRITE (theoretically what I do and the core reason this blog exists). So Twitter looked like too much of a time suck, and I wasn't in a shilling mood.

Lately, logging on more regularly again, and talking with my Twitter pals, not only has my following there seen a little increase, the stats here have begun looking less discouraging. Interestingly, bots are DOWN; which, with more activity, seems to my wee and paltry brain counter-intuitive, but it's certainly gratifying. They're still around in abundance, but more and more my legitimate travel gives them a run for their money, and even wins not-rarely.

Given there was a time I never got any real hits here at all other than randomly, or the roughly three people who put up with my poorly organized word-dumps, it's comforting to see sustained actual readership, even if the particulars are still murky given Blogger's curious algorithms.



As with Blogger, so with the actual work of writing. The WIP is still early going, but it's not an inviable embryo anymore, and its development is really exciting. I may be embarking on that hushed-taboo I've never indulged: writing a frankly and in detail about sex, in a work I intend for publication.

Mom won't read the work anyway, but it's still always been my standard not to humiliate her nor anyone I loved with work much too far to the outre' side.

I know we're not supposed to write for an audience; but with Ax it was pretty easy not to peel back the sheets on a couple comprised of a Catholic saint and the guy who wielded a pretty lethal ax and so on in order to gain his domains. (One could divert, here, into a discussion of the relative moral horror of gruesome battles and executions versus the objectionability of loving sex, but that is another post, and indeed one I probably don't need to even write at all).

But I want to contemplate sex and its role in a world so very different from "our own" (as if today's world is all one nice and convenient, homogenized experience ...). I want to give full life and beating hearts to characters of more variety and differing stations than Ax required me to consider. Maybe I want to work out issues of my own; storytelling is important, but let's not pretend my heart doesn't beat, and that has no influence. Maybe I just want to be a wayward little scamp and scandalize my family; it wouldn't be my first time. My instinct is, though, this story just calls for an entirely different look at relationships (and transactions) than Ax had the room for. The shift into multiple POV and third person creates (demands?) more perspective than the first-person narrative of a single, biased voice.

And sex is an un-ignorable part of human experience. Our expectations surrounding it certainly change, our attitudes toward it are formed by amazingly powerful and multifarious influences. It's strong stuff, with or without the framework of morality; and usually with ... though morality is slippery stuff.

Growing up, it wasn't so at my house. But growing up, there never was any pretense sex didn't EXIST. My mom and dad were very much into each other; my brother and I dutifully made fun of them for it. Its very undeniability underscored its dominating importance, and both mom and dad had their own clear ideas on the sanctity of Correct sexual behavior.

In a novel populated by women who facilitate birth, give birth, trade (and are traded) on marital alliances, and at one point even endure that sexy little malady, "hysteria" (go ahead, ask me what the curative was!): you cannot get the story done without a bit of sex  here and there.



For those readers I know don't get into sex scenes; maybe I'll have to put one up here, just for a test ride. I don't write erotica, though I think it's not true that what I write has no appeal. For one character, there is tragedy inextricably attached. For another ... the motives are less clear, though is many ways the connection itself is unadorned and straightforward. When it comes to marriages, sex must be had, and heirs underlie any "lying" (with) that gets done.

Fecundity is always present, too. Sex did not exist only unto itself, and this is a dynamic many today have never honestly grappled with. I knew people long ago whose "accidental" pregnancies were intentional "traps" in actuality (the success rate there was not necessarily encouraging). I knew people, too, for whom it was always recreational.

This latter dynamic? Not as easily achievable - not for women - in Late Antiquity.

Yet even that needs attention.


***


It is perhaps in order to apologize to my readership, that sex has so dominated my posts of late. But I find it hard to feel repentance.

Not because I'm a slut, but because: this is where the writing happens to be right now. And this blog exists because of my writing.

If it's better I lay off, don't hesitate to ask me to stifle it.

Or if you have questions about the politics and mechanics of ancient sexual practice - comment away with that. It's not merely interesting to research and consider, it's been a stimulating (har) subject, creatively. I'm both challenged and energized, and it's got me thinking - which usually gets me blogging away.

If I need to shut up, say so. Because after this, we get into all the other research (archaeology and Procopius - how I love you!). It could get less sexy, but it won't be diminished for self-indulgence as I geek out on studying.

More on Sex (or NOT)

The only thing about this article is my bemusement at the idea there are still people who don't know the chastity belt concept WAS a joke. It's been a long time since anyone took the idea seriously.

Hasn't it ... ? (Yipes.)

I would point out, though, that it's no fantasy there have been men through history who felt it necessary to control women. The final paragraph is a bit flip on this point.

Some of the theology, though, ties in nicely with the themes I've been working with on the WIP, and it's an interesting article.

SEXY SEX SEX SEX (... or, "Also, I Write")

For an author’s blog, there’s been precious little word around here lately about actual writing, and work in progress. Skipping over the inevitable excuses, I’ll admit there’s been LESS going on here of late, but thank goodness it’s not nothing at all.

Early in vacation, I was struck by some thoughts on the facts of life as it were; the expectations we place upon sex – today, or “in the past” – and how immutable these feel to us. Sex has always had a pretty high importance to human beings; at a guess, even before history got onto the subject, paternity and the apparent magic of a human being coming out of another one, seemingly out of nowhere. Its intensity of pleasure has long been tied to its importance in interpersonal politics, and perhaps the development of moral expectations was inevitable, given the esteem we place on lineage across all cultures.

These days, the idea of sex as a tool is generally considered rapacious beyond all sanction, and dismissed (again, across, at the very least, quite a *few* cultures) as immoral and crude. Bargaining for position by assuming certain - *ahem* - disreputable positions is, after first being offensive and manipulative, at bottom pathetic. It hardly fails to HAPPEN; indeed, some folks I've been aware of personally prove to me the phenomenon is not limited to the dregs of society. Entire industries and reality entertainment genres (*) thrive on the commoditization of "fairy tales" and wealth-as-romantic-glue, and there has been draconian conditioning, in the past thirty years, tying distinctly to certain gender roles/expectations and material outcomes. Hooray for marketing.

(*This, by the way, is not intended to refer only to romance competitions, but also to huge swaths of HGTV programming, mythologizing the importance of McMansions, settings, vacation stylings, and the types of couple-dom we should aspire to emulate; but at least they've embraced diversity in that last item, somewhat.)

American culture and pop culture have a uniquely slutty-yet-judgmental thing going on, wherein the increase in sales of lives for entertainment and prizes has produced that rarest of "guilty pleasures" - the right to judge others wholesale even as we simultaneously are enjoined to wish we had something we could sell for a good price.



"In the past", though ... transactional sex represented a wholly different market.

As was still true when I was growing up, and remains so for some today, girls and virginity were a whopping big deal. Speaking fundamentally to the importance of that lineage I mentioned above (read: PATERNITY, specifically), virginity took on an aura of magic which imbued it with an almost terrible power. To this day, PURITY is still subject to the curious confluence of desire and defense which mark something which is wanted precisely for the value in its own termination. Lifelong chastity may garner the golf-clap of social approbation. But it's the virgin on the marriage market who's long been an actual *prize* - sought for, competed over; her extinction the very highest tragedy and the greatest sacrifice to the gods.

Coming alongside paternity arise the subjective motivations - virtue and submission and status and all the tantalizing stories we've told, as humans, about the power and magic and pleasure of sex.



For a while there, the completely absurd working title for the work in progress was "Matrilineage" - not because even for a moment I ever thought that was remotely good, but because the WIP is a novel of women. Three generations, their experiences and their points of view. The midwife who spools from one of their lives to another has always been a prominent force, and she has begun seriously to develop. This is a woman whose life revolves around the reproduction of others.

The one male character who has developed any voice at all is: an illicit sexual partner.

Illicit sex had, fifteen hundred years ago in an Ostrogothic court barely a generation old, what you might call Serious Consequences. Particularly for a princess to be used in the marriage market by a king already proven canny in such alliances, and still in the process of using even chronologically advanced and legitimacy-compromised offspring in it.

Virginity was quite the big deal for a princess. Its being disposed of, deals still must be made; and advantages still could be constructed by marriage.

Many of the marriages in the WIP are matters of pragmatism, and some may have been more removed from romantic concerns than is generally popular to write about without the remediation of a little bodice-ripping on the side. The Ax and the Vase touched on this, and I even alluded to the ancient practice of a small country capitulating to the Roman Empire in order to get its protection, as a similar dynamic to certain marriages. In the WIP, the analysis will be much closer to my characters' hearts - and bodies - and I am intrigued not only by the possibilities, but by the implications. The perspectives are so necessarily unfamiliar, and I enjoy getting outside my own expectations (not only in my writing).

In Ax, this practical use of marriage as a tool got quite a light touch. To really explore the unpleasantness, though - and in ways it isn't always perceived by modern authors and audiences - excites my wee and paltry brain. It's bouncing around like Colin  (if you aren't a Hitchhiker's fan, the link probably won't help, and if you are, you don't need it: so skip the click either way - it's Wikipedia anyway, and I know how people can be about the 'pedia).

Suffice to say: inspiration. It's happening.

So yay for sex!

Collection

First off today, welcome and thank you to JEN Garrett, my 34th follower! Yay!

Next - I'm a bit late with the link, but yay more, for a tribute to writer Leonard Nimoy's birthday.

Megan Sayer has a lovely post about hope. It's hard. But, I've found, sometimes it's even harder not to.

Agent Carly Watters has good advice/encouragement - for the pre-published debut author. Just when I cool it on querying, of course (but she doesn't do my genre, so it's all right by me).

And now, a three-fer from The History Blog:

Scratch any archaeologist (but not on the lower back, their legs will never stop kicking) and you'll hear a midden story. This one may be a little adult for some readers (I'd call it NSFW), but it's still interesting history! Hint: sex toy. Yeah, we didn't invent those in the 20th century either.

Out of the toilet and into ... oh, wait. The sewer. Italian family finds 2500 years of history while looking for a broken sewer line. Man, it's boring when my toilet backs up. You know, by comparison. aaaaaaannnnd I'm okay with that. (Also with my parents not lowering me into the, erm, bowels of our home when I was twelve.)

And last, but least gross (though possibly disconcerting! and that is a pun!), 18th century Swiss automata. I'll embed the punnish clip below ...

Mixed Message Mesmer

This collection of vintage beauty ads is a morbidly interesting study in the many messages women get about their bodies - you're too thin! - you're too fat! - your hands are not lily-white!  No matter the delivery, "You are nothing but the object of someone else's gaze" is the point.

It's all meant in depthless, breathless fun, but the fact is, the archaeological/anthropological breadth in this collection is fascinating from a scientific standpoint, creating an incredibly clear gauge for anyone interested in analyzing the fashion for curves versus uber-thin, boyish bodies (WEAR OUR AMAZING RUBBER GARMENTS SO YOU TOO CAN BE BOSOM-FREE ... "medicated" no less, some of these ...).  I actually had an aunt who took the weight-gain tablets in the fifties.  And even in the 80s I knew a girl who intentionally took up smoking to lose weight, per the now-outrageous come-ons in the Lucky advertisement (though she used Marlboros - it was something of a rule, given we literally lived in Marlboro country ... on a side note - there was a smoking area at my high school; for the *students*).

Possibly the creepiest of a thoroughly creepy lot is the "Chubbettes" ad, which appears to be shilling girdle control garments to a grade school girl, so she can look "yummy" ...

"The heartbreak of dishpan hands" was a real, actual thing, kids.  I remember seeing stuff like that when I was a kid, and the line spawned lots of jokes - though none of those was particularly enlightened.

But the easy winner for offensive sexism is "I suffered from menstrual cramps" (image 25 of 26) - with the picture of the sneering (middle-aged) MAN bitching about how awful it is for husbands whose wives' tribulations apparently turn them into creased-foreheaded, over-the-shoulder-griping grossly wrinkle-necked whinge machines with more opinions than they could possibly have been worth enduring even in the 1950s.  What.  A.  Prize.  Schmuck.

Prey About It - Again and Again and Again ...

Most of the men I know who read my blog, or at least these posts about what it is like to be a woman, have asked me what exactly triggered what essentially appears to them to be an outburst.  Triggered is an interesting word choice, given its increasing association with the post traumatic stimuli of violative assault (I repudiate the term "sexual" assault, as rape is not and never has been about SEX - which is a sacred and blessed part of our humanity), and - yes - there was an incident recently that got me thinking about just how little most men understand the experience of womanhood - and, sadly, of girlhood.

The trigger, for me, was not something to get upset about.

And, the more I have let it sit and the more I have thought about it, THAT is precisely what upsets me so much and has got me talking.  The fact that an incident of personal violation, because it's "just" verbal, is not "worth" getting upset about in our world.

If it were a man, or a boy, people would smack foreheads and freak out.  But the thought of a woman's being inappropriately approached, in public, is quite literally "nothing" to us.  To men, *and* to women.

Which is simply an outrage.

There are a lot of other things going on in the world, too, which are worthy - indeed, demand - upset.  The boys club of the Texas legislature.  The depravity and intimate brutality to which a woman must be subjected by strangers because she has the temerity to create a professional career in sex education (this link is the story of a woman first verbally assaulted with vulgarity and insuperable presumption by a stranger with sexual advice for her to take with her own husband, and it is perhaps the finest written piece of meticulously reasoned, and REASONABLE, outrage I've read in months).  And it's not all sensational stories about ass-grabbing, either.  Sometimes it's disguised in terms like "gravitas" as we dismiss the (imaginary - and faultily reasoned) specter of the "gender backed" "female dollar."

We live in an excessively screwed-up (terminology and entendres quite entirely intentional, yes) world, society, and culture, and the rapidly increasing control exerted by every aspect of it upon women is frightening and angering an awful lot of us.

But, yeah - I began talking, began my personal version of "activism" by airing out the things I have to say and participating, well, actively in this "conversation" because of those things - and because of the recent thing - which have happened to me.  These things MUST be exposed to the light of day.  The intrusive consequences of simply being a woman are immoral, and these things must be said.  Again and again and again.

I regret, to an extremely small and not particularly uncomfortable degree, minimizing what has triggered me most recently - and yet, I also feel that, as Jill McDevitt points out, there's an awful lot about the experience of my gender and my body which are flat-out nobody's business but my own.  I may privately backtrack somewhat and explain what I am discussing here, for those extremely few men whose concern I actually give a rat's behind about managing - because I care about them and The Unknown, particularly when so archly published on the internet (after discussions dismissively saying "nothing happened") is sort of a wench move.  It may lead to clinical and substantive conversations which aren't all about me, and for those men I care about who have daughters, it could be worthwhile to take the instructive posts I've already written and contextualize them in the current events of a woman they care for in return.

As for the rest of you - given the disturbing and intimate personal information I've already shared, I don't feel it's appropriate nor necessary to go on about more.  This doesn't bear further actual explanation, no matter how strongly I feel that "these things" need to be said again and again and again.  Please understand that no new sexual (again there's that inappropriate terminology) harassment at work has occurred.  That physically I am intact and untouched.  That, depressing as it is, "It's really no big deal" is all it deserves, in terms of public discourse.

That my privacy is as much my own as my body.



Sometimes, I look at the extent to which my parents emphasized for me my bodily and spiritual autonomy, beginning way back in the wee hours of the 1970s, is almost miraculous.  That is the people who raised me - human beings of such dignity.  Who put a premium on their children.  Whose ultimate goal, whether it was religion or politics or personal experience of violation, was to protect and preserve and always to VALUE their daughter.

My sense of self wasn't something they taught me with tedious explicitness, by rote, even by words.  It was their inimitable example.

I am incalculably grateful for their lesson.

Preying and Hoping - the Difference

When I wrote The Uncensored Post, it had been my intention to follow up pretty quickly with a post about men which would put the negativity and outrage into better perspective, but time and inspiration have gone against my doing so to this point.  For that, my apologies, but now is the time.

Though a feminist and avowedly, publicly so, I have never fit into that half-delirious stereotype so many men *and* women fear, who refuse the label for themselves, or outright revile it for everyone.  I'm not a humorless, man-hating creature, out to set traps so I can consider men to be failures in one context or another.  Indeed, I never quite got over the eager proneness of my innocence, to indulge in crushes, and I was every bit as boy-crazy as any other kid when I was one.  It's just that my ability to find objects to crush on was refines with age, and my ability, too, to stick a landing so to speak - to stick with *one* crush (permanently) - reached an apex and hasn't fallen back down.  It's something of a privilege (and relief) of age.

Fun fact:  my very first crush of any kind, before I even had any idea of romantic interest, was Muhammad Ali.  I was about four or five - and he was right:  he was beautiful.

So on to the point, then.

Just now, in the grocery store (oddly enough - given how I was going on about grocery stores in that first post), I was approached by a guy.  (I say guy rather than man because, as young as he was, I feel almost squicky referring to him as fully mature, because I feel a certain need to repel myself from any hint of cougar-dom.)  He asked me what gym I work out at (I was wearing a knit cami and my "dog-walking" pants).  I laughed I'd been playing with my dog, and moved easily on.

The key to this encounter:  he let me move on, no further interest shown, no question, not even a backward glance.  It was fairly clear he was gauging his own possible level of attraction, but when the message came that there was not prospect, he stopped completely.  Passed him again a few minutes later, and zero "signals" of any kind.

The phrase men need to remember:  NO HARM/NO FOUL.  Now, most of us can live with a guy taking a shot.  As human beings, we'd never procreate at all, if  nobody approached anybody else, ever.  If there were no physical attraction.  It is vital to our humanity to make connections where none existed before.  The only problem is when there is no availability but that is ignored.

Persistence is a virtue - but a woman has an absolute, hermetic right to refuse and even to rebuff overtures.  So do men - and, in full disclosure, I have been rejected myself in making an approach.  Since I was eighteen (I remember the first time), I have been the one who started an approach which resulted in a relationship.  I get hit on, sure - but for pretty much all the significant relationships of my life, I initiated first contact.  That boy I watched Tootsie with.  The one I was sure I'd marry, senior year.  Beloved Ex.  That one with the metrosexual pants, whom a few folks were sure was gay (he was not).  Mr. X, in fact, has told me a hundred times he never would have crossed that room when I smiled at him, because he was sure I must be with somebody.  Shameless flirting is not enough.  So I just get pointblank.  There have been occasions it didn't work for me.  But I've been pretty lucky.

When someone says, though, "I have a girlfriend" or makes some demurring remark - I do precisely what I would expect and require any man to do in kind:  I let the heck go and either depart completely or change the subject.  Flatly.  The idea of pushing through a show of not being wanted is bewildering to me.

But our culture, unfortunately, has this "hard to get" practice, which renders BS in a man's mind any show of reluctance from a woman to his desires.  Even worse, there are women who actually *do* play hard to get.  (I don't mean to presuppose all games are terrible and must be forgone - but this one has created more problems than it can possibly be worth, and there are safer ways to tease someone you wish to keep on a hook; so "worse", above, isn't precisely a moral judgment ... even if I do find that dynamic personally worthless.)  So we've institutionalized the idea that "no" doesn't mean no, and that subtler signals, lord help us, might only be gaming cues.

I am again fortunate in that it is not typical for me to be outright misunderstood by anyone exhibiting interest.  In the past, I have indulged in ostentatious Ice-Queenery to get a point across, and when truly pressed, I've been able to provide acrobatically nimble rejections which leave no doubt and no room for further pressing.

Not all women are fortunate enough to have confidence enough that they're allowed to say no, never mind blessed with a pair of parents who taught them by unwitting but unremitting example just how to do it effectively.  I was given, and understood, boundaries from the earliest age.  It was also demonstrated to me in no uncertain terms that as a human being - as a girl - I had boundaries of my own, which were to be defended.  To some extent, this was a religious imperative imposed on a virgin daughter - but it was also the simple worth and value with which I was treated from the moment of my birth.  I was worth something, and nobody had a right to the core of me in any way, without my consent.  Ever.

Through my life, I have found men who did not plough over that worth, but who admired and valued it too.  That boy, that first love, that Beloved Ex - and Mr. X.  All of them responded to my sense of self with instinctive support, not some adversarial imposition of *their* sense of self as if it were an opposing force.

Not one of these men was in the slightest an emasculated nor submissive person.  As I expect not to be halved nor dominated, I do not reduce nor dominate either.  Beloved Ex and Mr. X, to be sure, are almost stereotypically manly - in all the good ways.  BEx has the warmth and comfort in his own skin I associate with manliness - with, indeed, the very model of manhood in my life, my own dad.  Who, himself, was no milquetoast.  He was passionately in love with my mom from the moment he found her, and was never anything less nor the worse for it.

No man has ever been diminished by emotional commitment to his partner.  Indeed, the measure of a real man (and a real woman) is the person who can give themselves completely and not see it as submission, as any negation of self.  To give fearlessly.

And I like:  real men.

I like them a very great deal indeed.



Edited to add that, ironically, this episode of Voyager happened to come up on my queue just after this post was finished.  Somewhere between Fatal Attraction and Trek, we have another character violating a crew member.  At least it wasn't Deanna getting raped again this time.  Voyager has a way of inverting the explorations of human relationships done on some of the other series.

Prey: An Uncensored Post

This blog is usually written to a standard that literally anyone could read it - my mother, my coworkers, my bosses, my nieces.

This post is written to that same standard.  And it has absolutely filthy language and ideas in it.  Sadly:  this needs to be said.  Again and again and again.


The first coherent experience I had of a sexual predator, fortunately, was anecdotal and not personal.  The Guy in the Yellow Camaro.  It is so general as to almost be an urban legend, but when I was pretty young, maybe nine-ish, there was a guy in the neighborhood driving around in his car trying to get little girls into it.  There were no horror stories (we heard) about his actually succeeding, but the word was out and the word was clear:  girls were for hunting.

I've tried, without enthusiasm, and realized that to catalogue my experience with creeps would be impossible.  I remember them all, but again - without enthusiasm.  There was the guy at the lake, when my family and my cousins' family were all together eating chicken and swimming.  The first stranger who ever told me to smile; we were on a trip and my family were all going to the bathroom or warming up the car - in any case, I was standing by myself in a restaurant and found the experience of a strange man attempting to turn my emotional state into his personal life decor - which must be *pretty* - ineffably horrifying and invasive.  Those boys at that party thousands of miles from anything I understood, whose Maccabee beer-driven sexual desires were more important than mine or my cousin's humanity.  I was fourteen.

The one who tried (and failed) to get in my pants all the while telling me he thought "that smell that girls have must be urine."  Because he found it filthy, as girls were apparently, and his grasp of feminine anatomy began and ended with "wanna grasp" and that was it.

The one my freshman year who fortunately was too drunk, even as huge as he was, to overcome me for meaningless, but still more-important-than-my-personhood reasons.

The one my freshman year I never so much as stood in a room alone with, who sneered a sexual smear against me to one of my best friends.

The one who pulled my skirt up over my waist while Beloved Ex, then my boyfriend, was onstage.

The ones my mother heard, on the night before my college graduation, screaming "I WANT SOME PUSSY" outside my apartment window (not particularly at me).  Mom got to like Beloved Ex, and understood why I was dating a "Townie", a whoooole lot better that night.

The one at that temp job who left anonymous notes on my car, when I worked sixty miles from home and was completely alone.  I never did find out who that was.

The one who walked me to my car, because that's what you do, you walk women to their cars.  So you can then attempt to coerce them into letting you into their cars so you can fuck them, again meaninglessly, because that is always more important than her dignity, her desire (or lack of it), her humanity - than anything about her except her genitals.

The ones who came up behind Beloved Ex that one night while he sat in his van waiting for it to warm up.  They saw beautiful blond hair and said to it, "Hey, baby - you want some cock in you?"

Beloved Ex, bless his very fine soul, was utterly horrified by that.  He was shaken.  I still remember his coming over to my apartment after that, telling me about it, genuinely bewildered, deeply offended and shocked.  "Do men SAY things like that?  Really?"

Yes, B.E.  Well ... not *men*, no.  But human males come up with that sort of thing all the time.

I kvetch a lot, sarcastically, about the whole "there is no war on women" thing we hear all too regularly (from the same quarters who helpfully inform us "it's not about race" when a young black boy is heedlessly murdered).  But it occurs to me ... one declares war on an enemy army.  The men who say these things, who do these things, do not consider women to be anything like an actual force.  We're seriously nothing more than a series of holes to these creatures.  Nice to stick a penis in, but otherwise only to be dismissed, and violently if necessary.


***


For any male who has read this far - ANY male - and, yes, I am thinking of all those among you whom I know will read this, my family, my friends, any one and every one of you:  this is what it is really like, to be a woman.

I am one of the lucky ones.  I've held my own, pretty much, even through my own utterly stupid years.  No man has ever hit me.  No man has ever called me worse than "bitch".  The man who did that cannot begin to know what it was he wielded, the abuse and damage that was simply by virtue of its being said by a man.  None of you can ever experience what it is actually like, all our lives.  Not even the ones who've heard things like, "Hey, baby, you want some cock in you?"

Because that happened once in the entire lifetime of a person now approaching half a century.

Because even if anything so shocking could be said to a man consistently, for life - merely by that physical presence we women hate to know is so different - the threat and the experience of it could never be the same.  As it is for a girl of nine, walking with a cousin across a parking lot near a lake, family not more than a couple hundred yards away ... but as far as the moon, if things had gone differently.  Being approached by a man pointing out her nascent breasts, being appraised like meat because that is what girls are for for too many men across our society.

Don't kid yourself it's just some creep in a yellow Camaro, either.

It's that rich boy in college, raised and tumescent with his own entitlement to satisfaction - and reared on ideas that women aren't really people.

It's the awkward guy in an office, who ties up a cherry stem, hands it to a woman after everyone has left the building, and says to her (honestly imagining this is a pick-up line ... and utterly unaware that there is no place for this behavior in this - deserted - setting), "NO HANDS."  Or who tells her confounding and gruesome stories, of all things, about his ex wife's bloody and horrific childbirth of their son.

Or the one who walks up behind a woman, again at work, whispering to himself - very archly so she can hear it - "I just have to say something" and then corners her OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM for fifteen minutes, starting off with the question, "are you married?" as if a wedding ring is the sole possible defense for a woman in any possible scenario denying him her attention.

It's the banker who, in 1962 or '63, my mom and all her coworkers have to use a buddy-system to avoid being alone in the vault with.

It's a perfectly nice guy on a date, who begins talking about the sex swing he and his ex had as a viable option for future time together.

It is the stranger in a parking lot, sure, who says "want some cock in ya" to someone he can't even identify as female ...


... but it's also the ones in disguise.  The ones we don't know for sure are harmless.  The ones who force us, every day, all of our lives, to gauge our personal safety, completely aside from "hating" men - but entirely because in order to function normally in an abnormal and sometimes terrible world, it is necessary to keep with us the gift of fear, at all times.  Without the healthy skepticism a certain level of fear for our personal wellbeing provides regarding interacting with other people, no woman can survive our society.

Period.

I am one of the lucky ones, and I am richly talented, full of life, confident, even sexy (sometimes ...).  And there isn't a day in my life fear has no role at all.

Someone recently scoffed at me, after a new door was installed in my home.  It has a large window, and I cover that window every night with a towel.  In order to see in that window, it would be necessary to come far up my front walk, to be very close to my house, to be making a stalkerly point of attempting to look in.  I cover the window anyway.

Live for twenty-five or so years of your life, as a woman alone in our country.

Live in that one apartment where the guy across the hall (a "nice" looking person, an upscale apartment building) comes to the door at three a.m., clearly with the intent of getting laid - and shocked that not only do you answer, when finally and awfully you feel forced to do, looking bleary and sleep-mussed (not in a sexy way), but that you evince instantaneous and forbidding hostility at the obviousness of his intent.  That bastard is fortunate I never called the police.

Live for a couple years with a registered sex offender as another neighbor.

Live, essentially, your entire adult life as a woman alone.  Not a woman hideously abused.  Not a woman with unusual experience of others' sexual deviance.  Just an ordinary woman.  In our decidedly non-ordinary world.  And see if you don't feel you have the right to cover a damned window, and let logic be damned.


***


My experience isn't even remotely encapsulated here.  I share what I have to give a reader ... to give men, frankly ... the slightest shred of understanding what goes into the life, even, of a highly privileged and fortunate woman on her own.  Every single one of you is a RISK, for us.  Every hello in an elevator, every passing car honking, every would-be friendly fellow at the movie theater trying to strike up that conversation we must navigate with painstaking care so as not to offend, and so as not to encourage.  Every.  Single.  One.  Of you.

Every man, whether WE like it or not, at the point of introduction (no matter the introduction) can be a threat.  That one boss who used to like to throw the rubber band ball at the front window of our office when women walked by - and who talked about the most illegally inappropriate things.  The nice guy we go out with once several friends and family are informed exactly where and how long we will be on a first date.  Even the friend of a friend, whom nobody could have known was into "that" ... or the man in the grocery store, who could be perfectly nice, but whose clear attempts to gain our attention will *not* desist no matter how utterly they are ignored.  Even the weird religious guy and his wife who interviewed me for a job that one time and who scared the bejeezus out of me with endless probing questions about whether I went to church and what my social life was like.  In an after-hours interview.  When nobody was in the office but the three of us.  *URK*

You think you are Just This Guy, See.  And we get that, and we aren't hateful about that.

But we require proof.  Just to survive.  KNOW this.  Know that I wrote this post specifically for you, and even to upset you.  For you to show your son, for you to remember if you have a daughter.  Know that nothing you ever do, say, nor consider, where a woman you don't know yet is concerned can be said or done without her having to go through a sophisticated process of calculation and vetting, just to swipe a damned ATM card at the damned grocery store.  Know this:  for your children.

Don't hold it against us because we put as much of a premium on our life and limb - and genitals - as some men put on their random and impersonal urge to domination and sexual release.

But do remember:  our lives are not like yours.



And, no.  Most of us, on the whole, are extremely unlikely to "want a little cock" in us if the approach is anything like so entitled, threatening, and dangerously random.

The man who doesn't even know I am a human being at all, I don't want to entrust with my decidedly human, and spiritually priceless, body.

Feminism and Me

I am a part of arguably the first generation of women in the world who could expect to live, without enormous obstacles or resistance, on our own terms. This is impossible even for me to fully "understand" really. The implications are too much; you live your life, and context simply is what it is. Most of us can't really comprehend the larger picture.

Knowing it, however, is really the key to gratitude. And grateful for the MANY blessings I've been asea in all my life, I definitely strive to be.

(As to the main one - even greater than my social opportunities - my parents and family; another post, and probably many of them.)



***


Privilege ...

Born white and middle class in a prosperous and arrogant country, I had advantages from the word go. My family valued education, and I got a superior one, most probably. Even my public education was excellent, though of course at the time I resented it duly, as was the habit of the day. Heh.

But to be born a girl in 1968 was something special.

I witnessed some small effects and details of the revolution of feminism's Second Wave, but of course had no proper notion of it. The world of my childhood wasn't something I quantified; it was merely experienced. I didn't understand that my own position in it was by some standards sequestered; by others practically cutting-edge. I just sat in my bedroom looking at the red-and-white gingham curtains, reading books of MAD and B. C. comics, playing with Barbies, hiding from my brother - or getting under his feet.

I hadn't any expectation that school wasn't a place I should raise my hand and speak up in; something even many women of my own generation *were* socialized to (not) do. In class and at church too, I talked when I had an idea. My family is rife with teachers - and that is what one does in class, any class.

This is inestimably a revolutionary thing itself.

I had friends who were boys; the first real friend I can remember was a little boy across the street from me. The redheaded kid up the street. I had girls for friends, too - from church, from my dad's coworkers' kids - but we had to go *see* them. Those closest by, in my immobile, walking-distance youngest years, were boys from the neighborhood. The girls around there whom I got to be friends with (and "friends" with) actually came later.

Having co-ed friendships at very young ages is nothing unusual, but a young WOMAN having male friends becomes stranger, as history brings the sexes to a certain age, and her freedom with males is constricted or removed. I used to drive packs of my friends around; whole crews of us, with car keys and two dollars worth of gas (it didn't buy a LOT more then than it does now; but I remember that being a fairly typical amount for me to spend on entire fuel purchases more often than not!). Unimaginable freedom, simply handed to me.

Through history, women have been brought up, if not as outright chattel, then at least as vessels; the premium placed on procreation and legitimacy cannot be overestimated. The mothers of the world had to be guided into proper position (correct marriages; correct comportment), and sexual behavior was both a woman's most formidable asset AND the most dangerous weapon to be used against her. This isn't new; it isn't old - it just is: the fear of a child not "really" its father's. The biological imperative. One can judge it ... or not ... but doubt it, and you live outside reality.

I grew up with the understanding that sexual behavior was, simply, not an option. Period. My mom had been reared in a time and a place where teenage hormones led to early marriages, often; and she had held out to mature a little, to become a professional woman, to find a husband she was more than merely excited about, but who embodied certain aspirational qualities: he would be educated. He would be professional. He would be kind, and ready for a family. He would support a family.

I didn't learn until I was nearly forty exactly how powerful my mother's resolve, in finding my father, really was. How she endured years of being considered a bit mad - she was very different from her schoomates. How she was called an Old Maid.

How she was rewarded for having a goal, and doing what it took to reach that goal.

My mother had to put a special guard on her teenaged sexuality, because she saw - even before her schooling was over - both the results of extramarital relations, AND marital ones. She understood, in a rare way, both consequences and possibilities. I can't begin to express how deeply I have come to admire the values she held to so very tightly, having come to understand them as I have.

I admire the devil out of her.


***


So I grew up with fairly old-school values, and *enough* timidity to hew to what I was told. (Few people understand me now as timid, but deep down most loud people are so.) My upbringing was simultaneously unprecedented in history, yet steeped in certain traditions. My deepest tenet, the older I get, but for a long time now, is gratitude for my many blessings.

One of my blessings has been choice.

Many people come to despise the word feminism, or feminists, because they've been successfully duped into thinking the belief comes down to a specific set of political principles. This is a pity and a shame - depriving not just "the movement" or an entire gender, if you look at things that way, but also the women who shy from the word because they're republicans, or religious, or afraid to be seen as strident, or just don't care but really dislike the label.

Feminism is choice. My mother made choices which in many lights appear to be old-fashioned (I've learned better, as noted), but she is the single most influential feminist in my life.

My dad was the second.

Neither one of them would, or would have, ever chosen the name "feminist" for themselves. But their teachings, to me and to my brother, were clearly laid out on the notions feminism really IS - not what it is depicted as being, by those who fear it so. That girls, ladies, women, students, dames, skirts, broads ... have rights. To live un-harassed. To live neither bought, nor sold. To be valued for more than the contents of their underclothing. To be smart, to be okay, to be HEARD. To be loved, whatever they are.

The point of feminism is not the right to have abortions, nor to hate men, refuse to marry, renounce the accoutrements of "femininity", nor even discuss the belief. The point is the RIGHT to follow one's own conscience - it is entirely possible to be a feminist and a pro-lifer. The point is the RIGHT to access to the world's advantages, and the tools to deal with the disadvantages. The right to be free of artificial disadvantages, born of nothing more than the absence of a Y-chromosome.

The point is choice - or, perhaps more incisively, autonomy.

I am part of the first generation or so of women, in the history of civilization, who can expect ... to live on my own terms.

What a magnificent thing that is to think.